Writing Tools/Techniques: Formatting is for FINISHERS

I could spend a week picking the right font, or the distance to indent the first line, or what theme/colors to use, or any one a thousand different knobs, bells, and/or whistles that modern word processors are overburdened equipped with.

None of which help me get a manuscript finished.

If you have any interest in the traditional publishing route or are looking to format an ebook, there is not a lot of flexibility. Either way you end up using something close to ‘standard manuscript format’. That leaves little room for anything having to do with formatting. Which makes sense, because, duh, the piece itself is really what is important.

All the time you spend tweaking things other than the words and how they go together is wasted time.

I avoid getting lost in the shiny, shiny world of editors like Word or Scrivener by doing all of my drafts is the simplest text editor I can. For a lot of people this would be TextEdit on the Mac or Notepad on the PC. I am a professional dork, so I use Sublime Text.

Whatever editor you use, the key is plain text. No tweaking options, there aren’t any. Just the grind of turning your ideas into words.

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Luke McCullough

Luke was born in a small town in western OR, and by the time he graduated high school had moved around enough to never feel like his identity was tied to anyone place. After college in PA, he worked a for a big company outside Seattle, WA doing small parts of interesting projects. And now is employed doing interesting things for a smaller company based in NY, NY. He currently lives in Arlington, MA.
Reading and writing have been a passion his entire life, though it has only been more recently that writing has been a focus for him.

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